Some of the most important scientific observations are simple, almost to the point of appearing self-evident, but they have profound implications. The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, for example, explains the observed motion of the planets in our solar system, but it also implies that the tiny lights visible in a cloudless sky at night are distant suns much like our own, with planets whirling around them, and that the firmament is not in fact the interior of a giant globe but is actually a gigantic and mostly empty three-dimensional space.
Einstein's idea that a beam of light recedes away from an observer at speed c no matter how fast or in which direction the observer is moving seems unimpressive at first - "light is very fast" - but it gives rise to the idea that if the speed of light is a constant, then it follows that miles and hours must be fluid, which implies that light is somehow embedded in the fabric of the universe and that time and space are linked.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution states that over the course of multiple generations a species will tend to mutate in such a way that it functions efficiently within its environment, not through conscious intent but simply because unsuitable mutations die before they can pass on their genes. Darwin did not believe that animals become better over time, merely that they adapted themselves to their environment.
The theory is simple but the implications are far-reaching. Traditional religion tends to imagine that human beings were created fully-formed by God to rule the world, but if all animal life is subject to a slow process of evolution the human animal must be mutating as well. If portraiture had been invented fifteen million years ago, and some of those portraits had survived to the present day, it would be obvious that we are not the same creatures we once were; and one day we will look back at twenty-first century humanity and be repulsed by our filthy hairy bodies and our need to wear socks.
This does not mean that God did not create us, but it does mean that he could not have created human beings as they exist today. Perhaps he created the protoplasmic goo from which we formed, or he devised the physical laws of the universe in such a way that life might emerge, but this raises another question. Are we God’s chosen creature, or merely one of many? We were not the only product of that protoplasmic goo, and all life derives from the motion of subatomic particles, so why should we be special?
Furthermore the success of an organism can only be measured in terms of its ability to survive within a given environment; not in terms of whether it is beautiful, or virtuous, but simply by its ability to survive and procreate. In a world where murderous dictators pass on their fortunes to a dozen kids while saints die childless, what is good and what is bad?
And if God’s role was to create the physical laws of the universe, why should it be that organic life was his aim? Suppose his goal was to study the behaviour of black holes, and we are just swarf from his workbench; an inconsequential biological infestation that spreads across some of his test subjects.
Perhaps the experiment was concluded billions of years ago, and we are simply waiting for God to wipe off the petri dish and start again. Before that happens I'm going to have a look at the Mac mini (early 2009), but before even that I'm going to have a look at Sade.
The video for Sade's "Never As Good As the First Time" features several unbroken shots of Sade riding a horse across southern Spain. Life is horror, capped off with the grim inevitability of death, and the best we can do is distract ourselves from the awful fact that we are just rotting animal meat. "Never As Good As the First Time" is as good a distraction as any.
In fact few things are more distracting than Sade riding a horse. Imagine if that was the whole world! For a short time I can pretend that I myself am a horse, and Sade is gripping me tightly in her thighs, and later on she will shower me with sugarlumps, and hopefully she will never read this.
The Apple Way
Sade's music, her persona, the ambience of her gesamtkunstwerk, whatever - it's a separate world that we can visit, a better world, and the same is true of Apple. The company's computers have a number of practical uses, but beyond that they fill an emotional need. Tony Blair would have described them as aspirational.
When I use Apple hardware I imagine that I am sitting in a clean white room with a wall of Expedit shelves holding rare groove records sourced from YouTube's sidebar. I imagine that I am syncing my iPod with FireWire.
Apple's mid-2000s design language made extensive use of unpainted aluminium and translucent white plastic. In this image my mini sits on top of a PowerBook G4. The first-generation mini complements my PowerBook G4. The mini's translucent plastic cap tends to yellow with age.
I've always liked the concept of a small, silent internet box, but at £800 the modern Mac mini is a hard sell. That's a lot of money for a machine with a GPU that's soldered to the motherboard, and I realise that nowadays there are external GPUs, but it still seems wrong to spend so much for a machine that has such limited expandability.
Ironically the mini began its life as a cheap, entry-level Macintosh. The original mini was launched in 2005 at a price of around £400, although you had to bring your own keyboard, mouse, and display; the idea was that existing PC owners might buy a mini just to try the Macintosh platform. Apple hoped that it would expand the base of people using OSX, thus making the platform more appealing to developers.
Alas for the mini its role as a cheap entry into Apple's ecosystem was swept aside by the iPhone, which was launched two years later; the huge success of the iOS App Store diverted the company's attention away from OSX and the computer range, and as a consequence development of the mini has proceeded in fits and starts since then.
The mini remains something of an outlier in Apple's product range, but it fills enough niches - low-power server, portable music machine, media centre, basic PhotoShop computer, cute lifestyle accessory - that Apple has been unwilling to kill it off entirely.
The pre-unibody minis have a non-slip rubbery base. The mini tends to run hot, so it's a good idea to elevate it slightly or rest it on something conductive, like metal or glass.
A Brief History of the Mac mini
The first Mac mini was powered by a single-core, 32-bit PowerPC G4 running at 1.25, 1.33, 1.42, or 1.5ghz, with a maximum memory ceiling of 1gb; in terms of raw computing power it lagged behind contemporary Pentium M-powered PC laptops, but Apple marketed it as a general lifestyle machine so the slow CPU wasn't a huge problem. It wasn't intended to run Doom 3.
Historically the mini kicked off a fad for small form factor PCs. The idea had been floating around for a while, but it was hard to build a small PC around a Pentium 4, and none of the mini's predecessors had the same kind of marketing push as the mini. My recollection is that early-2000s mini-PCs were the same size as a micro-hifi system, e.g. they were twice as tall as the mini. It wasn't really until the middle of the decade that it was practical to stuff a bunch of laptop components into a small case and sell it as a genuine desktop PC alternative rather than a limited novelty toy.
A year later AOpen released a Pentium M-based clone that was conceptually similar but looked hideous - it also sold for twice the price of the mini - but in general the SFF movement never really hit the mainstream. It's not that people didn't want small computers, it's that smartphones and tablets and latterly the Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC can perform the same tasks just as well in even-smaller boxes.
The G4 Mac mini came with OS X 10.3 Panther and latterly 10.4 Tiger, although it could be upgraded to 10.5 Leopard. The general consensus is that 10.4 Tiger is just fine for PowerPC software and 10.5 Leopard only slows the mini down. Contemporary reviews bemoaned the stingy RAM allocation - just 256mb on the entry-level model - but on the other hand the interior was user-servicable, so owners were free to buy the cheapest mini and upgrade the memory themselves.
On the second-hand market today the G4 Mac Mini is awkward. It only has two USB ports and a single full-sized DVI port. It uses PATA hard drives, and the G4 processor is only capable of running PowerPC-era software. For web browsing I use TenFourFox on my old PowerPC machines, but my hunch is that the internet would be very slow on a 1.42ghz G4 with only 1gb of memory. Purely as an objet d'art the G4 mini suffers in comparison with the earlier, more expensive, but considerably flashier G4 Cube, so if you want a cool ornament why not buy a Cube instead?
I shouted my question to the heavens. "Why not buy a Cube?" But answer came there none.
The G4 mini was launched after Apple had switched the iMac and Power Macintosh to 64-bit G5 processors. There was never a G5-powered mini; IBM couldn't make the G5 run cool enough. In fact just six months after the mini was launched Apple announced its intention to abandon PowerPC entirely in favour of Intel x86, so the G4 mini has the honour of being the last brand-new Macintosh product released during the PowerPC era.
They were replaced with Intel-powered minis in 2006. The new breed had four USB ports but were otherwise much the same, port-wise, as their predecessors. The price rose to £600 for the dual-core 1.66ghz Core Duo model. There was also a £450 Core Solo model, but it was generally seen as a bad deal; the Core Duo model was much faster.
The Core Solo mini is notable for being one of the few mainstream computers that had a Core Solo. The Solo was essentially a Core Duo that had failed Intel's quality control, with the faulty core disabled; a bit of Googling suggests that it was used in a couple of cheap laptops and almost nothing else. Thankfully the CPUs in the early Intel minis were socketed, so with deft hands and some thermal paste it was possible for mini owners to replace the Solo with Core Duo chips.
In 2007 the Intel minis were upgraded with the new 64-bit Core 2 Duo. Unfortunately the machines still had 32-bit firmware, which meant that they were unable to run versions of OS X beyond 10.7 Leopard. There doesn't seem to be a way to hack them to run newer versions of OS X. They can be BootCamp-ed into Windows 7, which still runs Chrome, but that seems a needlessly complicated way to surf the internet.
Counter-clockwise from lower left the 2009 mini has power, ethernet, FireWire 800, Mini-DVI, Mini-DisplayPort, USB 2 ports, then audio in and out, Kensington lock, ventilation slots, power button.
It would be great if you could turn the mini on by tapping the Apple logo on the lid, but you can't.
It would be great if you could turn the mini on by tapping the Apple logo on the lid, but you can't.
On the used market the early Intel Mac minis are intriguing as simple media servers and/or souped-up alternatives to something like a Raspberry Pi. For internet surfing they're in an unfortunate dead zone, being too old to run modern versions of Chrome or Firefox but not niche enough to have a cult following, so they can't run TenFourFox either.
The mini's compact desktop presence becomes less compact when you plug anything into it. Some bulky USB peripherals - sound cards, for example - won't fit unless the mini is lifted up slightly, and heat from the fan tends to toast anything plugged into the USB ports, so you might want to use a USB hub.
The Core 2 Duo models remained on the market unchanged for almost two years before being replaced in early 2009 by the subject of this blog post, the early 2009 Mac mini. The new mini had a number of internal tweaks, plus an extra USB port, and crucially it included two video ports, one Mini-DV, the other Mini-DVI. I say crucially because I find it a lot easier to work with two monitors.
The 2009-onwards models can run up to 10.11 El Capitan natively. El Capitan was current from 2015-2018 and is no longer updated, but it will run the most recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, so the 2009 Mac Mini is the oldest Mac Mini that doesn't require hacking or tweaking if you just want to surf the World Wide Web. You might want to be wary about buying things online or banking with one.
Thanks to DosDude's easy-to-use patching utility the 2009 minis can be hacked to run the most modern version of MacOS, which as of this writing is 10.15 Catalina. On a personal level I'm not fond of Catalina, if only because it won't run 32-bit applications; that includes a lot of older games, ironically the only games likely to run well on a mini.
What's the 2009 mini like to use? I've never used a mini before. The first thing that struck me is the silence; the machine is designed to spin the cooling fan as little as possible. As a result it idles at 60-64c, twice as hot as my desktop PC, but after eleven years it still works, so presumably the heat isn't that much of a problem. It's nice being able to listen to music without a faint whirrrrr in the background. The only distracting noise is a faint high-pitched whine from the SSD, which is easy to tune out.
After a bit of experimentation I tried mounting the mini vertically, on its front, with the exhaust fan and ports on top. An unconventional solution but it seems to work; the machine now idles at around 54-57c, slightly cooler. Obviously this blocks access to the optical drive slot, but after souping up my mini (see below) it no longer has an optical drive, so that doesn't matter.
On the downside the built-in DAC is really bad. Or perhaps it just isn't very well shielded. The audio out socket suffers badly from electrical noise, no doubt caused by all the components being packed into a tiny case. I solved the problem by using an ancient MOTU 828 FireWire audio interface, which is overkill; alternatively you could use a cheap USB sound card (my old Asus Xonar U3 works fine and doesn't require any drivers with OSX).
My mini's previous owner upgraded the memory to 8gb and installed an SSD. He was obviously a man of taste. Judging by Geekbench my 2ghz dual-core Core 2 Duo mini is around a quarter the speed of my 3.4ghz quad-core i7-3570 desktop PC, which has 12gb of memory. For standard desktop use it only feels slower when using GPU-intensive tasks such as YouTube at 1080p. Otherwise I don't notice a difference.
According to my power meter the mini draws 28 watts while playing an album with iTunes and editing this blog post with Chrome, which has eight tabs open. The following piece of music was sequenced with Logic Express 9, and if I run the sequence the power draw goes up to 32w, with the activity monitor telling me that it uses a third of the machine's processing power:
In comparison my ancient Power Macintosh G5 draws 230w when running the same sequence, but the G5 was infamously power-hungry.
My desktop PC draws around 75w idle and 140w+ under load, but it's hard to compare the two machines because my desktop PC has a much more powerful GPU. No amount of power will make Sleeping Dogs work on a 2009 Mac Mini.
What came next? The 2010 models had a completely new case that brought them in line with the contemporary unibody MacBooks. The new case was slightly larger than the pre-unibody models, albeit that the total system footprint was smaller because the unibody models had a built-in power supply unit. The pre-unibody models have an external brick:
The 2010 early unibody models had a 16gb memory ceiling and dual display ports - Mini-DisplayPort and HDMI this time. They topped out at OS X 10.13 High Sierra, but they can also be hacked to run Catalina. The 2011 models were similar, but they (finally) brought i5 and i7 processors to the mini range, about eighteen months after the iMac and a year after the Mac Pro laptop. They also dropped the optical drive. The 2012 models were also similar but mostly had quad-core i7s. They can run MacOS Catalina natively, so they're the oldest minis that can run modern MacOS without hacking or special tweaks.
The mini was never aimed at the performance market, but with high-speed external drives the 2012 models were attractive media creation machines. They were in theory replaced in 2014 by a new set of minis, but the 2014 models were controversial. Partially because the memory was soldered onto the motherboard, which meant that owners were stuck with the factory configuration, but also because the quad-core CPU options were dropped. In general the 2014 models represented everything that people dislike about Apple - their mixture of forced obsolescence, un-upgradable internals, profit maximisation, meanness, their habit of leaving empty bottles in the fridge, etc.
As a consequence late-2012 quad-core i7 minis still fetch surprisingly high prices on eBay, because they're more powerful and expandable than their replacements and are still capable desktop machines eight years later.
Apple then seemed to forget about the mini. The 2014 models remained on the market unchanged for four years, during which time Apple launched the iPhone 6, iPhone 7, and iPhone 8, plus the first three generations of the Apple Watch, plus two generations of the 5K iMac, and in addition they relaunched, revised, and then abandoned an entire range of MacBooks, and J Geils died alone at home at the age of 71. Four years is a long time in the computing world.
Perhaps in compensation for the lengthy wait the 2018 minis were a major advance on their predecessors, with a memory ceiling of 64gb and a graphics system that could drive three 4K monitors. They brought back quad-core CPUs and user-replaceable memory. They are the current generation of Mac mini; they are still on sale today.
But for how much longer? In 2020 Apple announced that it would switch its computers from Intel x86 to ARM processors in the near future, which raises the question of whether the company's computer range will be gutted or revitalised. The mini has far more internal storage than an iPad, but Apple is keen to sign people up to its streaming services, so internal storage is not in Apple's interests. The mini also has more ports than an iPad, but an iPad docking station would fill the same role. The ARM development machines are built into Mac mini bodies, but this doesn't necessarily mean there will be an ARM-powered mini; the development machines could well be kludges not intended for mass production. The future is not yet written.
EDIT: A few months after writing this Apple launched an ARM-powered mini. What do I know? It was part of the initial wave of Apple Silicon-powered machines, alongside a new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The M1-powered 2020 Mac Mini was simultaneously a step forward - one-third faster than the fastest Intel mini, with one-third the power consumption - and also a step back, because the internals returned to being un-upgradeable.
In brief the 2012 unibody models are still decent desktop machines in 2020. If you're going to spend money on a mini then a quad-core i7 2012 model with 16gb of memory and a big SSD would be a sound choice. The 2011 models are almost as good. The 2014-2018 models aren't very attractive; they're new enough to sell for high prices on eBay, but they're difficult to expand and repair and don't perform as well as their predecessors.
If you're going to spend a lot of money a brand-new 2018 model will remain current for several years to come. I don't have access to Apple's secrets, but I suspect that the company's decision to adopt ARM was driven more by a desire to manufacture its own CPUs than because x86 had hit a dead end. The current situation isn't directly comparable to 1994 or 2006. If the problem was the poor performance of recent Intel CPUs it would have been simpler and cheaper for Apple to switch to AMD's x86 processor range instead. As such I imagine that the 2018 minis will age gracefully; the new ARM machines do not represent the same performance step-change as PowerPC and Intel before them. (EDIT: But see above; the M1-powered mini was a substantial performance jump).
The 2009-onwards models are the cheapest used minis that can be hacked to run current versions of OSX. They're good value as general media servers. The pre-2009 models are technically obsolete and are awkward internet machines on account of the lack of a current browser, and the G4 Mac Mini is really a cult retro toy, but there's nothing wrong with that. As such if you're going to buy a mini nowadays the best choices are (a) 2012 (b) 2018 (c) 2009.
Souping Up a 2009 Mac mini
After that preamble let's get down to business. Let's roll up our sleeves, dab the crooks of our arms with alcohol, and draw blood! Let's send the blood off to the laboratory! And then do it all again because the blood sample got lost in the post.
As mentioned above my mini has already been upgraded with 8gb of memory and an SSD. Those are the two most obvious upgrades; the third upgrade that everybody does is an extra hard drive.
This involves opening the case. The chaps at iFixIt used a plaster spreader. I used a razor-sharp Opinel folding knife. I jammed it into the side of the case and prized out the interior because nothing escapes this world unscathed.
It's a cliche, but opening the old-fashioned Mac mini the first time is harrowing; the second time it's merely scary, but after that you just roll on top of her and do your thing and roll off again, like a pig, or a dog. We kid ourselves that we have souls, but we don't. The soul is just an illusion sustained by our own vanity and we are animals driven by lust.
Animals driven by lust. Surprisingly the aluminium case isn't used as a heatsink. You'd think Apple would have added a pipe that transmits heat to the case, but in practice the mini's exterior remains cool to the touch even when the interior is running hot. Safety issue? Thermal expansion? Who knows.
With the top off the mini is a compact block, with wifi and Bluetooth antennae sitting on little poles and a DVD drive on top of the motherboard. I tried running the machine with the DVD drive taken out to see if it would be cooler; it was, but that was because the fan went mad, so I assume that the optical drive helps direct airflow.
The mini has a motherboard with CPU, GPU, and memory connected to the bottom of the case, with the storage connected to a daughterboard that sits slightly higher, hard drive and DVD from bottom to top. The storage uses a pair of SATA 2 connectors, although apparently some SSDs are flakey if they're used in the DVD bay, so I opted for an old-fashioned 7200rpm hard drive instead.
It's a good idea to periodically open the case and blow out the dust. If you're feeling brave it's also a good idea to replace the thermal paste, which I will have to attempt at some point.
Adding the hard drive involves buying a caddy. Mine was a universal mount that also goes into MacBook Pro laptops. The screwholes don't line up properly, but the caddy fits. I guess I'll just have to make sure I don't shake the mini around:
It was a surprisingly easy process. I just had to unscrew the optical drive, pull it out, insert the hard drive caddy, and close the case. If you do this you then have a choice between simply using the second drive as a mass storage device; using it to make Time Machine backups of your primary drive; setting it up with a different version of OSX for compatibility reasons; the sky is your oyster.
I cloned my installation of Yosemite onto it using OSX's built-in Disk Utility with a bootable OSX USB stick, although Carbon Copy Cloner is just as easy; once that was done I upgraded my boot drive to El Capitan, and at some point I'll use DosDude's tool to upgrade it further to Mojave.
The reason for this kerfuffle with Yosemite is that, as mentioned earlier on, I intend to run Logic Express 9, but LE9 only works with versions of OSX up to Yosemite. Or at least I used to think so; after upgrading to El Capitan is still seems to work, so perhaps I am mistaken. It definitely breaks at some point up the OSX chain.
Why Logic Express? An awful lot of older Apple hardware still works but doesn't meet the system requirements for Logic Pro X, besides which LE cost me £40 and has almost all the functionality of Logic Studio. That's why.
Beyond music I have also made a concerted attempt to use my mini as a daily computer. It's quiet, not obviously slower than my desktop PC, but utterly useless for games, so I'll have to finish Ori and the Blind Forest later.
In general the biggest fuss when switching machines is logging back into all the websites I use. As a proof of concept I even wrote this blog post from start to finish with the mini, including images, and I can confirm that Apple's computers can be used to generate content for the internet, thus.
EDIT: Early in 2022 I upgraded the Mini to run MacOS 10.14 Mojave, which is the last version of OSX / MacOS that can run 32-bit applications. The 2009 Mini will also run 10.15 Catalina, but that strips out 32-bit compatibility.
This involved using DosDude's incredibly helpful patching utility, because the 2009 Mac Mini doesn't natively support Mojave. It ran flawlessly, although after installing Chrome I had to reinstall the patcher's legacy video drivers, otherwise Chrome was just a grey box. Apple gave up on Mojave in November 2021, but it's still widely supported by third-party applications.
Despite its modest specification the 2009 Mac Mini runs surprisingly well with Mojave. I was expecting it to turn into a stuttery heat-spewing monster, but no. If you have a last-generation silver-and-white Mini or any of the unibody Minis made in the last decade sitting around doing nothing, and you want to save a bit of electricity by surfing the internet with it, they will at least surf the internet. Rubbish for games, but it's a Macintosh, that comes with the territory.
